Bonesland
Brendan Lawley
ISBN: 9781925603583
$19.99
309 pp
Text Publishing 2018

To an older, white male living in a ‘genteel’ suburb of Melbourne (Australia), some other suburbs and some rural towns can look and sound like a foreign country. Bonesland unfolds in such a ‘foreign’ setting.

Most of the characters are teenagers, in themselves members of a foreign group to this reader. The narrator, a sixteen-year-old white boy, ‘suffers’ from a form of OCD and may be somewhere on the autism spectrum or have mild Asperger’s. He has an older brother and a collection of disparate friends. One of these, Jimmy, mostly talks like an American rapper. Throw into this an older boy who relentlessly bullies Bones and an African-American female exchange student, and Brendan Lawley creates a potent first novel. (more…)